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Dominique Hache
Dr. Marcea Ingersoll
EDUC 5423: Methods in Middle School Language Arts
17 October 2016

Philosophy for Teaching Middle School Language Arts

My passion for the English language and the literature that belongs to it is rooted in my
early childhood. When my brothers and I were young, my mother, an English major and teacher
of 25+ years, read to us everything from classic nursery rhymes to the modern epics of Tolkien
and Rowling. When I reached my adolescence, like most of my peers of the internet generation, I
became detached from the world of books and turned to the massive universes of modern film
and video games. At the time, I had no idea that I was experiencing literature in a way that most
children prior to my generation had ever before, nor did my parents or teachers. When The Lord
of the Rings hit the big screen, my world became one like that of middle earth: vast, fantastic,
grotesque, full of beauty, rich with new emotions, and full of adventurous and courageous desire.
Soon, the farm house, deep in the woods where grew up was not something I dreaded tending to
every day; it was the battleground of Helms Deep; it was the Fangorn Forest where the ents
slept; it was the Shire.
My experience with literature in school was vastly different. Throughout elementary
school, I read at an above average level and typically did very well on the standardized tests that
were assigned for nearly every book in our schools library, except for when I reached the higher
leveled texts in middle school which had Tolkien among them. When I failed the first test Ive
ever failed in school - an online comprehension test of The Hobbit - I was immediately turned off
by reading because, suddenly, I was bad at something I was passionate about. Still, though, I
remained obsessed with the film series because it was something that welcomed me to learn
through my own passionate devices, and allowed my imagination to run wild, instead of asking
me what character said a certain thing to another halfway through an introductory chapter. My
passion for film in such a way only increased as my academic life went on, especially during my
undergraduate degree.
For these personal reasons, my philosophy for teaching language arts at the middle school
level is simple: grant students the opportunity to experience literature in multi-generic and multi-
modal ways. Accordingly, my philosophy for assessing for growth is subject to the same
ideology. As discussed in Anne Burkes Changing Modes of Expression, with the resources
available to us today, assessing for growth in regards to literacy does not have to be limited to
traditional assignments or papers; ones ability to be literate can be expressed through countless
technological, performance based, spoken word, written, and artistically expressed ways, as well
as many others. As Burke states: we need to think of literacy in terms of what is done with the
skills, and not just a set of skills and techniques that must be practised or memorized (218).
When students are gaining literacy skills through many mediums, we should be accessing and
assigning work accordingly. Where one student may happily express their literacy skills through
an essay about a book they just read, it may be more effective for another student to express what
they learned in a short video, a dramatic re-telling, a series of tweets, even a snapchat story.
That said, I am not delegitimizing the book-in-hand method(s) of literacy; it is still,
perhaps, the most crucial skill a student can develop, but it is not the only way a student can
experience literature and learn something meaningful. It is our jobs, as teachers, to make these
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other ways of experiencing literature and literacy accessible to our students for the sake of their
learning, but also with an underlying responsibility that is, perhaps, more crucial than anything
else: teaching the social responsibility of media and technology-based literacy.
If we are to teach narratives that students can learn from through other mediums of
literature (film and countless other forms of technology and media), then we must also teach our
students what biases these very mediums of message contain, and how to be responsible
readers/viewers. For example: although a film may be a useful way of differentiating a language
arts lesson for teaching a specific topic, it may also have contain cultural bias that can be
demeaning to someones humanity by inferring stereotypes or any other false constructions.
Although many films bear these negative connotations, there are many films that do not, and
maintain an exceptional educational quality. One film that comes to mind that is appropriate for
middle school viewing is Danny Boyles Slumdog Millionaire. Its exciting and empathy-inducing
narrative holds the interest of the middle school mind as it follows the story of a young, poor
Indian boy of their same age, but simultaneously illustrates globalization and its effects, allowing
for something to be learned with respect citizenship (an area of the grade eight curriculum in
New Brunswick). Films such as these are great alternatives for teaching topics that may
otherwise be dry, or inaccessible to the majority of students in the modern classroom through
traditional means. As a result, at such an impressionable age, we need to be mindful of the
narratives we chose to show our students. Often an educational movie can be less educational
than originally thought to be, and damaging to the cultural values of a particular minority group.
Others, evidently, can be very useful to us, and I plan to use them.
In Critical Media Literacy in Middle School: Exploring the Politics of Representation,
Jesse Gainer argues that teaching media literacy at the earliest possible levels of education is our
urgent obligation as teachers to uphold modern democratic values. Gainer raises the point of how
many of the narratives our students are in contact with are highly constructed, and that it is
necessary to empower students with the ability to adequately understand media literacy in all of
its dimensions, including the ability to identify biases for the sake of thinking critically about
how their world is shaped, and the cultures within it. If one thing is evident within the worlds
current political climate, democracy sits in the hands of education. More particularly, it requires
students who are eventual voters not to believe, at face value, the messages provided to them
through technological mediums. As teachers, it is our jobs to grant students educational
opportunities for the sake of their own happiness, and their development into responsible and
empathetic citizens. In the age of globalization, global citizenship, and the tolerance and
education it requires is, perhaps, more important than ever.
To conclude, and to make reference to Burke once more, literacy, in relation to todays
modern adolescent learners, manifests as a life event (219-20). Everyday our students are
experiencing some form of literacy in countless ways, mostly technological. By adjusting our
instruction and evaluation to something that caters to the needs of 21st century learners, our
students learn through ways that occur naturally and meaningfully to them, each method as
legitimate as the next. We must cater to the needs of all of our students in our instruction. While I
cite film as my passion for accomplishing such an issue, it will only be used as needed.
Multimodality is the most effective way to optimize learning; it allows us teach a variety of
educational topics to the majority of reachable minds. While Slumdog Millionaire may raise
awareness about globalization, a poem or song from a First Nations community can also be used
to teach citizenship to modern students. The options are endless. We are fortunate to have more
resources than ever before at our fingertips, but we must be mindful in how we use them.
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Works Cited